Experience - Robotics and Autonomous Systems

19 years experience in designing, implementing and demonstrating autonomous systems; began designing and building autonomous systems for military operations and planetary exploration in 1977

Developed and executed techniques for constructing robots and autonomous systems including sensing and situation awareness, planning and control, communications and coordination, and architectures and applied these techniques to an autonomous ground surveillance robot, an integrated flexible welding system, a planetary rover, a semi-autonomous simulation of military forces, and a semi-automated military commander

Conducted surveys and coordinated workshops on robotics, mobile robots and robot architectures

This experience in complex system modeling and simulation can be organized into the following technical areas:

sensing and situation awareness
planning and control
communications and coordination
architectures
Ground Surveillance Robot
Integrated Flexible Welding System
planetary rover
military robotics
mobile robots and autonomous vehicles
robotics surveys and workshops

The following sections provide more detailed information about the experience in these areas along with citations for the technical publications produced.

Sensing & Situation Awareness

Designed and demonstrated an intelligent tactical situation analysis system, an acoustic obstacle detection system for a robotic Light Armored Vehicle, a non-imaging optical technique for measuring satellite rotation, an agent-based concept for detecting and tracking intrusions in computer networks, and a concept for sensing hazardous road conditions from a moving vehicle [64]
Developed techniques for multi-sensor data fusion and knowledge-based position location and applied those techniques to the GSR [36, 37, 55]

Planning & Control

Designed and managed the implementation of a knowledge-based control system for an autonomous vehicle [22], a probabilistic reasoning network for robot planning [31, 44], a laser welding planning system [24], and an autonomous robot control system that maps multiple competing goals into multiple control axes [58]
Reviewed and compared the available techniques for route planning to set the foundation for developing the route planner for an autonomous vehicle [25, 27]

Communications & Coordination

Developed techniques for describing robot tasks [12] and implementing systems of cooperating robots (i.e., task description, communications protocols, command language, task allocation and monitoring, and dynamic coordination) [38, 51]
Designed protocols to support robot communications [9], a command language to control a semi-autonomous planetary rover over communications channels with limited bandwidth and long round trip delay [53], and an intelligent vehicle convoying system that uses inexpensive inter-vehicle laser communications

Architectures

Designed advanced architectures for over 19 different information systems including an onboard computing system for a high-rate mine neutralization system, an automated tactical situation analysis system, fault tolerant wafer scale integration [11], a hybrid knowledge-based signal processing system that supports very large input volume rates [20], enterprise command, control, communications, computing and intelligence (C4I) system, a distributed blackboard for intelligent machines [21, 32-34, 47, 52], autonomous vehicle control [44], a knowledge-based welding automation system [24], automation augmented teleoperated vehicle control, an agent-based large-area physical security system, a semi-autonomous planetary rover sensing, computing and control system [50], a simulation-augmented spacecraft ground operations system, a distributed nuclear power plant control system, an intelligent vehicle convoying system based upon laser inter-vehicle communications, intelligent intersections that actively control surrounding vehicle movement to prevent intersection accidents, an agent-based oil tanker damage control system, the robotic onsite support and intelligent ground control system for a semi-autonomous lunar observatory, intelligent semi-automated forces, object-oriented automated Navy command forces, advanced distributed simulations, and agent-based distributed computer network intrusion detection
Assessed the limitations of current autonomous system architectures and designed a concept for reconfigurable architectures to overcome those limitations [40, 41, 57, 59]
Led a study evaluating the application of object-oriented techniques to systems architectures; developed an object-oriented architecture for large scale advanced distributed simulation systems based upon that study’s results

Ground Surveillance Robot

Led the development and implementation of the USMC Ground Surveillance Robot (GSR), a computer and sensor controlled armored vehicle [18, 28, 31, 39, 44]

Integrated Flexible Welding System

Designed a knowledge-based welding automation system; led the development and implementation of multiple interacting expert systems for weld planning, robot path planning and designer interfaces for an intelligent laser welding system [24, 35, 42]

Planetary Rover

Designed the sensing, computing and control architecture for a semi-autonomous planetary rover [50]

Military Robotics

Studied the applications of robotics to military combat and performed analyses to identify the opportunities and limitations for robotics applications in military combat [14, 16, 17, 29, 49]

Mobile Robots & Autonomous Vehicles

Served as Mobility and Navigation Technical Editor, Journal of the Society of Robotics and Automation, 1984-1987
Conducted and published extensive surveys autonomous submersibles [15], mobile robots [43, 45] and autonomous vehicles [23, 46]
Co-organized the NATO Advanced Research Workshops on Mobile Robots and Mobile Robot Implementation [48]

Robotics Surveys & Workshops

Conducted and published extensive surveys of the technical literature in robotics [19] and European robotics research [26]; evaluated the state of the art in robot computing architectures
Co-organized the ONR-London Workshop on Robotics [30] and four IEEE Workshops on Architectures for Intelligent Control
Served as Exhibits Chairman for the 1994 International Conference on Robotics and Automation